Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Blindfolding a tester of cooked dehydrated spinach at the regional agricultural research laboratory, Albany, California: photo by Russell Lee, June 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Is it better not to know?

Blindfold test for aroma of cooked dehydrated spinach at the regional agricultural research laboratory, Albany, California: photo by Russell Lee, June 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

"Is it better not to know?" is a fascinating question that I've been pondering. As much as I dislike feeling this way, I think the answer is sometimes certainly "yes". But having been blindfolded once (during the commission of a crime), actual material blindfolds (as opposed to self-imposed mental blindfolds) give me the creeps. Since I'm not the person being blindfolded, however, I think these photos are charming.

I usually go with "yes", but I am weak, and an escapist. So I'll go with... Yes.

Actually, two things led me into the extremely obscure corner pocket of the agricultural research test station in Albany, California. One spark of motivation was the fact that the photographer is Russell Lee, whose archival trail I was blindly pursuing, snail-like, in the depths of night. Two is that if it were seventy years ago, I could actually hobble down on my failing stumps to that station myself, and be blindfolded, were I summoned, and/or so inclined (and of very few other historical locations is it possible to say this).

Anyhow, thank you friends for noticing this one... we here thought these photos quite interesting.

(There were about a hundred shots in the file, many of them wonderfully loaded with largely unintentional historical implication, but the wiser half of the decision team prevailed in the editing conversation.)

By the by, for what it's worth (zero), this pairing of posts, featuring a toothsome menu of Guano and Dehydrated Cooked Spinach, was intended as another hesitant foray into Food Blogging -- a stringent emergency-measures corrective, perhaps, to prior cholesterol-laden vessels sunk in the moat of the foyer of Chez Beyond, hauling to the murky bottom of the blogosphere a heavy cargo of

I believe that in some parts of Polynesia dehydrated cooked spinach is referred to as "chype", and that when someone is invited over for a feast of chype, one is always blindfolded first, and then asks the ritual question, "So what's for dinner," and is given the usual answer, "You don't want to know."

In fact I believe it is rumored in certain quarters that the Polynesian Chype Feast was originally designed as a parabolic model of American politics.